During the years 1916-1921, starting with the Easter Rising in Ireland, a revolutionary wave swept the world; it saw the establishment of workers republics first after the October
Revolution in Russia, then Ukraine, Latvia, Hungary, Slovakia and Bavaria in Southern
Germany. There was an unprecedented level of workers self-organisation, centred on workers councils or soviets , viewed as the organs of communal self-management. A new
Communist International was founded to help organise world revolution, a through a unification of the revolutionary Marxists new communist parties were founded. The creation of a free communist society was not an abstract goal in some far of future but within immediate grasp.
Corresponding with the upsurge was a renaissance of Marxist thought with such figures as
Lenin, Luxemburg, Lukacs, Gramsci, Korsch, Pannakoek and many, many more, whose works continue to be unearthed today bearing testament to the creativity of that generation.
At great cost for humanity the first world revolution was defeated, most decisively in
Germany, the various efforts of the October Revolution to expand failing. The short-lived
Soviet Republics in Hungary, Slovakia and Bavaria fell. The infant Union of Soviet Socialist
Republics was founded in isolation, for reasons both internal and external; the counter revolution that emerged from within the revolution, triumphed over the exhausted revolutionary forces. From our 21 st century vantage point we can now see that there were definitive moments in deciding the fate of the Russian Revolution, that the Bolshevik
Thermidor was not a single event but a protracted process. Nor was it inevitable, history offered the Russian Communists many opportunities to continue the revolution, in other words, “to organise the creative impetus of the masses, which was directed towards the construc tion of a new society.”
1
Despite the efforts of various movements and currents which sought to reassert the selfgovernment of the soviets, they were defeated by the new elite. Instead the USSR was transformed into its opposite, a totalitarian state-socialist system in which the state became the universal capitalist. The Third Communist International became corrupted and subservient to the national interests of Russia rather than the world Communist revolution.
The manner of the defeat of the first world revolution has had immense repercussions for
Communists today. The fact that the counter-revolution was a process of class struggle not a single event within the USSR and internationally, resulted in a prolonged a fracturing of the
Communist movement. The analysis of the traditional left, particularly of various Trotskyists, is to identify the determining factors not in class struggle but of the political titans - Stalin and
Trot sky. It is an idealistic view of history, with more in common with Nietzsche than Marx’s dialectics of negativity.
One consequence of this approach has resulted in a number of historical paradigms composed of historical traditions which provide the underpinning ideas of various contemporary sects. Whether in the Orthodox Trotskyist or the “other Trotskyism” paradigm we find an historical schema of papal succession.
2 This sectarianisation of history hampers our ability to actually come to terms with the legacy of the first world revolution, not to mention preceding history. Individuals which fall outside the parameters of the accepted paradigm being excommunicated and their work declared heretic by the high priests. .
A genuinely critical Marxism should see no contradiction in defending the October
Revolution and the Bolsheviks whilst simultaneously criticising, bureaucratic centralisation and the undermining of soviet power. We can defend Lenin’s Hegel studies and work on the dialectic, his recognition of new subjective forces of revolution – workers soviets and national liberation. But also sympathise with the various Communist oppositions to Lenin and
Trotsky’s one party-communism. We appreciate Western Marxism and the council communists in our process of conceptualising a communist alternative today. Similarly in reclaiming communism the vernacular tradition require restoration from its Stalinist
1 A.Babenko, Bolshevist Bonapartism, Nasha Borotba, Geneva, January 1948, .6.
2 Symptomatic of such the sectarian paradigm is The Fate of The Russian Revolution, Lost Texts of Critical Marxists, Ed.Sean Matgamna.. This seeks to establish a tradition the ‘Workers Party tradition’. However it is one which no member of the Workers Party could honestly recognize in the organization which existed for nine years.
Matgamna deliberately excludes those members of the WP, and all other Critical Marxists who do not fit into his preconceived view what the Workers Party should represent. CLR James is hardly mentioned, Raya Dunayevskaya is non-existent, for a book on the Stalinism all the East European contributors to Labor Action and New
International and absent amongst many others.

misappropriation, such as the work of the early Communists in England such as William Paul,
J.T.Murphy, Tom Mitchell, William Bell and Arthur McManus and many others.
We need to come to terms with the first world revolution in order to help us reconceptualise communism as an emancipatory alternative for the 21 st century. To do so we need to unshackle ourselves from the paradigms which are part of the defeat, we are not proposing an eclectic, tool-box appropriation of selected Marxist thought but a critical reengagement with our past, of our tradition, as a totality – aufhebung.